Musicology Today 2012 100 Years of Polish Musicology

6 Sławomira Żerańska-Kominek
Emperor Francis I (later — King Jan Kazimierz) University in Lvov, where
he began to teach and where he organised a Chair of Musicology — the second
(after Cracow) centre of musicological studies in the territory of (partitioned)
Poland. Łucjan Kamieński (1885–1964) also completed a comprehensive
course of studies at Berlin’s University and the Hochschule für Musik,
was named associate professor in 1922 and became the head of Poland’s third
oldest musicological centre — the Faculty of Musicology at Poznań University.
The founders of the musicological centres at the universities in Cracow,
Lvov and Poznań organised them in agreement with the German-Austrian
model. And, even though during the last one hundred years the Polish musicology
has discovered many ways and directions of its own, consistently reformulating
the old “scope, method and aim”, it still maintains strong links
with tradition.
The two centenaries of the foundation of academic musicological centres
in Poland have provided an opportunity for a reflection on the history and
the future of our discipline, which is currently practised at six Polish universities.
Polish musicologists have met at two solemn anniversary sessions
organised by the Musicologists’ Section of the Polish Composers’ Union.
In November 2011, the Jagiellonian University held a conference entitled
A Hundred Years of Polish Musicology: History – the Present – the Prospects,which
became an occasion for a detailed summary of the discipline’s achievements,
especially — of the work of Zdzisław Jachimecki and Adolf Chybiński. The
second debate, organised in co-operation with the Fryderyk Chopin Institute
and entitled Polish Musicology at the Start of the New Century: Scope, Aim,
and Method (Radziejowice 2012) concerned first and foremost the challenges
that Polish musicology is likely to face in the future.
The publication of this collection of papers constitutes the last act of the
centenary celebrations in our country. It presents the profiles of the founders
of Polish musicology: Zdzisław Jachimecki, Adolf Chybiński, Łucjan Kamieński
— and their direct continuators. The work and research done by those
distinguished scholars continues to inspire new generations of Polish academics.